


held together by those strangling threads

by celebreultimaverba



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Champion/God Relationships, Post-Canon, it's not a fix-it which i do apologize for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 08:50:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16531340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celebreultimaverba/pseuds/celebreultimaverba
Summary: He's her champion, whether he likes it or not.Musings about the semi-divinity Vax has earned himself, and how he and the Raven Queen fit together.





	held together by those strangling threads

She does remember what it was like to be mortal. Of course she does.

She spends her days, now, around the threads of fate that mortals weave, and some days, she regrets the choice she made. She misses, a little, the freedom of choice that mortals have, when they weave their own destinies around her. She’s bound to those threads of fate, now, tangled up in them as the world she watches over changes, changes, changes, twisting their threads around her so fast that she’d never escape if she wanted to.

But she can’t want to, not any longer, because she’s a goddess now, and maybe a bit lonelier for it, because she still remembers what it was to be mortal, because she’s necessary but neutral, because even the gods on either side of her will never truly know who she is, because none of them had ever been what she was.

But, every few centuries, she gets a chance. Her champions.

And this latest one, he’s amazing.

He doesn’t want her, not really, but he loves his sister, and he begs for her to take him, and she can’t pass it up. She sees his soul, burning on its golden thread, almost too hot. She sees him force together the thread that just broke next to him, along with the help of these other threads, inextricably tied together by forces stronger than even her. She gives him a nod, and his sister breathes once more.

Oh, but he’s not hers, then, not technically. Fate never says that one soul has to be given for another, not as long as both are given eventually.

But he walks into it. He drowns for her, and meets her face to face, and she tells him, wishing to take his face in her hands, “You have such loneliness in your eyes.” He _does,_ and it’s a little heartbreaking. She remembers, vaguely, what it was like to have a heart, and remembers, even more vaguely, what it was like to break one. It’s strange to see a man so lonely, when she can also see the golden threads of fate wrapped around his wrists and throat of all the people he’s loved, all the people he’s saved. The broken threads around his feet of all those he didn’t, or couldn’t.

Of course, he can’t see those threads.

She takes off the mask and lets him see her as herself, but mortal, the elf that once had those threads wrapped around her fingers that she could pluck like violin strings without even realizing that she had such a power.

He’s still scared of her, but he accepts her. Maybe because he doesn’t think he has a choice (he loves his sister _so much),_ but maybe, maybe it’s because he can sense the threads around him, and he wants, a little bit, the purpose that comes inherent in weaving them together.

She chooses to believe it’s the second one.

He’s not hers yet after that. But when he leaves, he leaves her knowing that there’s a _yet._

Parts of his family die, then again, and again. He dies, and she picks up the pieces of his soul like so many scattered bits of gold and platinum, and puts him back together like his family asks her to, because she knows that the yet hasn’t come yet.

And she whispers in his ears, sometimes, calls him fate-touched, because those golden threads around him just keep getting tighter and tighter. She’s sometimes afraid of them choking him, but he relishes in it, laughs more, says he could die tomorrow and presses his lips to the lips of whoever the hell he wants, because he could die tomorrow and he doesn’t want to die without giving that love away. And every time he gives it, the threads get tighter.

Finally, he dies, and his family is panicking because there’s no pieces to ask her to put back together, and they don’t have the diamonds or the time to make them.

But his thread isn’t broken, and there’s the yet.

She takes a hold of his soul and tugs him close, and asks him what he wants. She knows what he’ll say, and he says he wants his family, so she weaves him a new body of the golden thread he’s made of, wraps it in a cocoon of his family’s threads, and sends him back to them.

He’s as whole as she can make him, which isn’t whole at all, and yet, he’s still not fully hers.

She senses when Vecna’s thread is cut, and pulls him back to her.

Then, and only then, is he hers.

Which, unfortunately, means that he’s _her._ An extension of herself, her right hand, her fate-touched, her Vax’ildan.

The champion of a goddess, kept by her side, a divine job to do.

A sense of fate, of death, and an inability to say no to her.

Immortality, amorality, and a pair of jet-black raven’s wings that she sometimes strokes her hand through, scattering the shed feathers into the beds of the family that he’s left behind.


End file.
